In this picture doesn’t the President look as though his eyes wanted to stay closed? For to open them is to see the truly terrible things he has said and done.

Trump speaks to the country in two opposing manners, by tweets and by telepromting. The tweets are his own, reflecting his own bigoted if not downright racist views. The words of the teleprompter are those of the people around him in the White House, his cronies, the few that are left and are still in his corner and trying to keep him standing, from going down for the full count.

From the editors of the Washington Post

PRESIDENT TRUMP controls the greatest loudspeaker in the world. On Monday, he said from the White House that “our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy.” He added, “Hatred warps the mind, ravages the heart and devours the soul.” Well put. Unfortunately, Mr. Trump has recklessly used racism, bigotry and hatred for many years, in coded formulas and direct speech. To truly honor the victims of El Paso and Dayton, Mr. Trump should vow never again to spew his loathing from the bully pulpit.

Trump’s past loathings from the bully pulpit

Mr. Trump has stigmatized Mexicans since the day he announced his candidacy for president, and has spoken as though all Muslims are dangerous. He denounced Latino migration as “an invasion of our country,” demonizing undocumented immigrants as “thugs” and “animals.” At a rally in May in Panama City Beach, Fla., he asked, “How do you stop these people? You can’t.” Someone in the crowd yelled back one idea: “Shoot them.” The audience of thousands cheered — Trump smiled. Shrugging off the suggestion, he quipped, “Only in the Panhandle can you get away with that statement.” When avowed white supremacists marched in Charlottesville in August 2017 and one of them drove his car into a crowd, killing a peaceful protester, Heather Heyer, Mr. Trump condemned “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides,” as though others besides the white supremacists were to blame.

Mr. Trump wrote in January on Twitter, “More troops being sent to the Southern Border to stop the attempted invasion of illegals through large Caravans into our country.” Mr. Trump also wrote last November that “the U.S. is ill-prepared for this invasion, and will not stand for it.” Before opening fire in El Paso and killing 22 innocent people, the 21-year-old alleged shooter wrote, “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.” Mr. Trump said in July, “Allowing the immigration to take place in Europe is a shame. I think it changed the fabric of Europe and, unless you act very quickly, it’s never going to be what it was, and I don’t mean that in a positive way.” The shooter wrote, “The natives didn’t take the invasion of Europeans seriously, and now what’s left is just a shadow of what was.”

The president’s words have wide and deep consequences. When he smears all Latinos or Muslims, announcing walls or visa bans to keep them out; when he denounces the news media as “enemies of the people,” using Stalinist terms; when he says four congresswomen of color should “go back” to the countries they came from — all these spread fear, exclusion and hatred.

By the Editorial Board of the Washington Post, August 5, 2019

Another Must Read, by George Will

Last century’s immigration debate makes today’s seem enlightened
By George F. Will June 28, 2019

“Wide open and unguarded stand our gates,
And through them presses a wild motley throng . . .
O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well
To leave the gates unguarded?”
— Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1892)

If you think we have reached peak stupidity — that America’s per capita quantity has never been higher — there is solace, of sorts, in Daniel Okrent’s guided tour through the immigration debate that was heading toward a nasty legislative conclusion a century ago. “The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America” provides evidence that today’s public arguments are comparatively enlightened.

Late in the 19th century, immigration surged, as did alarm about it, especially in society’s upper crust — particularly its Boston portion, which thought that the wrong sort of people was coming. Darwinian theory and emerging genetic science were bowdlerized by bad scientists, faux scientists and numerous philistine ax-grinders with political agendas bent on arguing for engineering a better stock of American humans through immigration restrictions and eugenics — selective breeding.

Their theory was that nurture (education, socialization, family structure) matters little because nature is determinative. They asserted that even morality and individuals’ characters are biologically determined by race. And they spun an imaginative taxonomy of races, including European “Alpine,” “Teutonic” (a.k.a. “Nordic”) and “Mediterranean.”

Racist thinking about immigration saturated mainstream newspapers (the Boston Herald: “Shall we permit these inferior races to dilute the thrifty, capable Yankee blood . . . of the earlier immigrants?”) and elite journals (in the Yale Review, recent immigrants were described as “vast masses of filth” from “every foul and stagnant pool of population in Europe”). In the Century monthly, which published Mark Twain, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, W.E.B. Du Bois and H.G. Wells, an author informed readers that “Mediterranean people are morally below the races of northern Europe,” that immigrants from Southern Italy “lack the conveniences for thinking,” that Neapolitans were a “degenerate” class “infected with spiritual hookworm” and displaying “low foreheads, open mouths, weak chins . . . and backless heads,” and that few of the garment workers in New York’s Union Square “had the type of face one would find at a county fair in the west or south.” The nation’s most important periodical, the Saturday Evening Post, devoted tens of thousands of words to the braided crusades for eugenics and race-based immigration policies.

“The Great Race Passes”:
Edgar Lee Masters (“Spoon River Anthology,” wrote:
On State Street throngs crowd and push,
Wriggle and writhe like maggots.
Their noses are flat,
Their faces are broad . . .

Eugenics was taught at Boston University’s School of Theology. Theodore Roosevelt, who popularized the phrase “race suicide,” wrote to a eugenicist that “the inescapable duty of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world, and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type.” Woodrow Wilson warned against the “corruption of foreign blood” and “ever-deteriorating” genetic material.

Amateur ethnologists conveniently discovered that exemplary Southern Europeans (Dante, Raphael, Titian, Leonardo da Vinci) were actually from the north. One wrote, “Columbus, from his portraits and from his busts, whether authentic or not , was clearly Nordic” (emphasis added). Okrent writes: “In an Alabama case, a black man who married an Italian woman was convicted of violating the state’s anti-miscegenation law, then found surprising absolution when the conviction was vacated by an appellate court’s provocative declaration: ‘The mere fact that the testimony showed this woman came from Sicily can in no sense be taken as conclusive evidence that she was therefore a white woman.’”

The canonical text of the immigration-eugenics complex, Madison Grant’s “The Passing of the Great Race,” is available today in at least eight editions and is frequently cited in the Internet’s fetid swamps of white-supremacy sites. At the 1946 Nuremberg “Doctors’ Trial,” Nazi defendants invoked that book as well as the U.S. Supreme Court’s Buck v. Bell decision upholding states’ sterilization of “defectives” (Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a eugenics enthusiast: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough”) and America’s severely restrictive Immigration Act of 1924. It based national quotas on 1890 immigration data — before the surge of the “motley throng.” Okrent writes, “These men didn’t say they were ‘following orders,’ in the self-exonerating language of the moment; they said they were following Americans.”

Four years before the 1924 act, 76 percent of immigrants came from Eastern or Southern Europe. After it, 11 percent did. Some of those excluded went instead to Auschwitz.

Washington Post of June 1, 2019

I take the first two paragraphs and many of the ideas in what I have written below from Dana Milbank’s op ed piece. Trump’s Raison d’etre is White Power.

Milbank:
“We tend not to realize how much of the president’s appeal is about race. Studies show the primary indicator of support for Trump isn’t economic insecurity but racial resentment. This doesn’t mean Trump supporters are torch-carrying racists; it means they fear losing their place…”

“And this is largely why the daily mayhem of the Trump presidency has no discernible effect on support for Trump: not the petty (the White House ordering John McCain’s name covered on a Navy ship); not the ludicrous (the Energy Department rebranding liquid natural gas “molecules of freedom”); not the insidious (Trump continuing to allege a “Russian hoax” and his own innocence after special counsel Robert Mueller demonstrated otherwise); not the ugly (Trump resisting disaster aid for Puerto Rico for months, and GOP lawmakers this week blocking the legislation); and not the inhuman (migrant children held illegally, and dying, at the border). All of this pales against the existential threat to traditional white America from what it perceives as nonwhite interlopers.”

Yes, that’s right, Trump supporters live in “fear losing their place.” [place meaning white skinned supremacy] And they fear no less, if they’re Senators or Representatives, losing their jobs if Trump’s base were ever to turn from them.

The current brouhaha over the census question is an illustration of what Trump is continuing to do in support of white supremacy, not the same as gerrymandering but much like it in respect to the results. Both would put down the darkskinned immigrant populations. Although they will eventually fail they seem now that they would like to take others down with them in defeat.

Wilbur Ross, Trump’s man and toady at the Commerce Department, is proposing that a citizenship question be placed on the 10 year census questionnaire. Although it’s been tried before it’s never been been done. The constitution wants everyone counted (except the Indians who pay no taxes).

But you may ask what’s wrong with having a citizen question on the census? Why shouldn’t counting us involve counting us as citizens? Well, for one thing (other than the fact that it never has been) a citizens count would mean that millions of us would not be counted (how many, 11-15 million residents who are not yet citizens?).

And why is this important? Well the 10 year annual count does two very important things. It determines the number of representatives there will be to the House for each state. And since the non-citizen residents are mostly dark skinned immigrants their being removed from the census would favor the position of the remaining numbers of white skinned residents.
Then too you might ask, and I’m sure there will be judges on the Supreme Court who will be asking this, why shouldn’t citizenship be all important in the 10 year count? Well as I say it never was, nor was it ever intended to be so. And now if enacted it would definitely be favoring one race over other races. And I don’t think, at least I hope so, that we don’t want to do that. Shouldn’t a president’s only real job, or if you prefer most real job, be to bring us together and a citizenship question on the census would do just the opposite.

How many non citizens live in the United States? Here’s the answer I find on Wikipedia: Approximately 43.3 million foreign-born people live in the United States, that which includes 20.7 million naturalized U.S. citizens and 22.6 million non-citizens as of Apr 20, 2017.

We are told that within a quarter-century, white Americans will no longer be the majority. While this needn’t be a loss for white people — immigration isn’t zero-sum — but Trump’s GOP has convinced his followers it is. Therefore, preserving white power becomes essential, and the citizenship question buys time.

Here’s where we are now: The Supreme Court has just a few weeks left to decide whether to endorse the Trump administration’s proposal to add a citizenship question to the census.

San Antonio doesn’t have time to wait for Washington to pass an immigration plan

By Robert Rivard, May 16th 2019

There is no time for such standoffs in San Antonio, where asylum seekers released by federal authorities along the border arrive in daily waves at the downtown Greyhound station.

The influx poses a significant challenge. I spent a recent night with migrants as they were welcomed at the bus station and taken to an adjacent migrant resource center and then a nearby church shelter for an overnight stay. San Antonio is a strategic way station, the point on Interstate 35 where asylum seekers see a long journey turn from terror and uncertainty to a first glimpse of a better life. It’s a second, invisible border crossing, evident in the relief on the faces of parents and children alike.

San Antonio has never declared itself a sanctuary city, but it is a city that has always offered it: to Mexicans fleeing revolution 100 years ago; to New Orleans residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina in 2005; and now, to fleeing Central Americans. A city with a majority-Mexican American population has a culture and history rooted in migration. The harshness of our national politics cannot change that.

Some days, 100 to 125 migrants arrive from the border. This week, the number flared to 200 or more daily. At times, it has been higher. “The migrants arrive only with the clothes they are wearing and what they can carry, and what they can carry in most cases is their young children,” said Colleen Bridger, the city’s senior public-health official who oversees San Antonio’s humanitarian, medical and shelter response. “We get no help or funding from Washington even though we are, in effect, acting as an extension of the federal government by processing and providing vital services to these asylum seekers.”

Bilingual relief workers escort new arrivals from the station to a makeshift migrant resource center inside a city parking garage where the San Antonio Food Bank serves a hot meal. Volunteer physicians and nurses deliver medical attention. Fresh clothing and footwear from Goodwill replaces tattered garments worn on the trek north. Every adult receives a new backpack with a Red Cross blanket, a bag of 20 snacks, soap and toiletries, crayons and a coloring book, a small stuffed animal, a used English-Spanish paperback dictionary, and a reusable water bottle. Sanitary products, over-the-counter medicines and diapers are distributed as needed.

Catholic Charities, which operates its own shelters around the city, helps fund the purchase of bus tickets that will take the migrants to other destinations after spending the night at the nearby Travis Park Church, a Methodist congregation with a history of serving the homeless and welcoming the LGBTQ community.

The aging church hall is a warren of rooms crammed with cots, a haven. Most asylum seekers leave the next morning on buses for their final destinations and waiting family or church sponsors. Immigration court hearings are likely 16 months or more into the future.

Migrants shared with me their harrowing stories of escape — deja vu for a reporter who covered Central America’s civil wars in the 1980s. The lawlessness that has reverberated down over the decades provides the setting that so many impoverished and threatened people seek to escape.

Heidi Serrano, 20, a third-year university student, arrived here 70 days after fleeing her home outside San Pedro Sula, Honduras. A local policeman showed up at her door one night and demanded weekly protection payment of 1,500 lempiras, about $60. “Someone I know … gave the policeman my cellphone number, and he began to track me,” Serrano said. “ He finally told me he would kill me if I didn’t have the money for him by the next day. I fled at dawn.”

Jeremy Herrera Mendoza, a slightly built 12-year-old from Guatemala City, was leaving school when members of La Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, approached. “I could either join their gang or they would kill my mother and younger brother,” Jeremy said.

The vicious street gang controls many of the poor urban neighborhoods in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Jeremy skipped school for one week to avoid gang members but then returned when his mother, Karen Mendoza Centeno, learned of his truancy. Gang leaders found him again and gave him one day to join or lose his own life.

Jeremy broke down crying as he told his mother the truth. Karen, 33, Jeremy and 9-year-old Abrahám boarded the first bus the next morning to Mexico, abandoning their home and belongings. Mendoza paid $2,500 to a coyote to smuggle them across the Rio Grande on tire tubes. They were then detained by the U.S. Border Patrol.

City official Bridger said San Antonio’s efforts to deliver services to the arriving migrants are straining local budgets, but the city does not intend to stop, regardless of how long the crisis continues.

No end is in sight: Last week a federal official told me 14,000 asylum seekers were awaiting processing that day in detentions centers, tent camps and other makeshift facilities along the border. The next day, that count grew to 18,000.

“At first we said, ‘Let’s gear up for a two-week response,’ ” Bridger said, “We now realize it’s just nonstop, it’s the new normal.”

Robert Rivard is the editor and publisher of the nonprofit Rivard Report in San Antonio.

Adam B. Schiff, a Democrat, representing California’s 28th Congressional District and chairing the Intelligence Committee of the House wrote on February 6 the following letter to his Republican colleagues.

This is a moment of great peril for our democracy. Our country is deeply divided. Our national discourse has become coarse, indeed, poisonous. Disunity and dysfunction have paralyzed Congress.

And while our attention is focused inward, the world spins on, new authoritarian regimes are born, old rivals spread their pernicious ideologies, and the space for freedom-loving peoples begins to contract violently. At last week’s Munich Security Conference, the prevailing sentiment among our closest allies is that the United States can no longer be counted on to champion liberal democracy or defend the world order we built.

For the past two years, we have examined Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and its attempts to influence the 2018 midterms. Moscow’s effort to undermine our democracy was spectacularly successful in inflaming racial, ethnic and other divides in our society and turning American against American.

But the attack on our democracy had its limits. Russian President Vladimir Putin could not lead us to distrust our own intelligence agencies or the FBI. He could not cause us to view our own free press as an enemy of the people. He could not undermine the independence of the Justice Department or denigrate judges. Only we could do that to ourselves. Although many forces have contributed to the decline in public confidence in our institutions, one force stands out as an accelerant, like gas on a fire. And try as some of us might to avoid invoking the arsonist’s name, we must say it.

I speak, of course, of our president, Donald Trump.

The president has just declared a national emergency to subvert the will of Congress and appropriate billions of dollars for a border wall that Congress has explicitly refused to fund. Whether you support the border wall or oppose it, you should be deeply troubled by the president’s intent to obtain it through a plainly unconstitutional abuse of power.

Obstruction of justice is hard to prove, even if Trump makes it look easy. How to prove obstruction of justice: Did the suspect have corrupt intent, and would the actions, if successful, be likely to obstruct the proceeding? President Tariff Man may be learning all the wrong lessons from his trade wars

To my Republican colleagues, hear this: When the president attacked the independence of the Justice Department by intervening in a case in which he is implicated, you did not speak out. When he attacked the press as the enemy of the people, you again were silent. When he targeted the judiciary, labeling judges and decisions he didn’t like as illegitimate, we heard not a word. And now he comes for Congress, the first branch of government, seeking to strip it of its greatest power, that of the purse.

Many of you have acknowledged your deep misgivings about the president in quiet conversations over the past two years. You have bemoaned his lack of decency, character and integrity. You have deplored his fundamental inability to tell the truth. But for reasons that are all too easy to comprehend, you have chosen to keep your misgivings and your rising alarm private.

That must end. The time for silent disagreement is over. You must speak out.

This will require courage. The president is popular among your base, which revels in his vindictive and personal attacks on members of his own party, even giants such as the late senator John McCain. Speaking up risks a primary challenge or accusations of disloyalty. But such acts of independence are the most profound demonstrations of loyalty to country.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III may soon conclude his investigation and report. Depending on what is in that report and what we find in our own investigations, our nation may face an even greater challenge. While I am alarmed at what we have already seen and found of the president’s conduct and that of his campaign, I continue to reserve judgment about what consequences should flow from our eventual findings. I ask you to do the same.

Congress did its job on the border deal. It needs to do it again by amending the emergency act.

If we cannot rise to the defense of our democracy now, in the face of a plainly unconstitutional aggrandizement of presidential power, what hope can we have that we will do so with the far greater decisions that could be yet to come?

Although these times pose unprecedented challenges, we have been through worse. The divisions during the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement were just as grave and far more deadly. The Depression and World War II were far more consequential. And nothing can compare to the searing experience of the Civil War.

If Abraham Lincoln, the father of the Republican Party, could be hopeful that our bonds of affection would be strained but not broken by a war that pitted brother against brother, surely America can come together once more. But as long as we must endure the present trial, history compels us to speak, and act, our conscience, Republicans and Democrats alike.